


Lost

by MizBlackCrow



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 16:50:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10194305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MizBlackCrow/pseuds/MizBlackCrow
Summary: Set at the end of Exodus (2x15). Supergirl fails, and Supergirl falls, and Alex is thrown to the stars...





	

The ship rises, uncontrolled. Thrusters rumble a frequency that hits in the belly. The ship vibrates like an earthquake as it pushes towards the sky, and Alex Danvers is trapped in the pilot’s seat.

She tries everything: manual overrides, calling Winn, even hitting something with the butt of her gun. But nothing helps. The course is set. The overrides will override nothing.

And then her heart begins to swell. The thing she’s been waiting for – hoping for – happens. She sees a streak, just a glimpse of a red and blue suit, and she’s face-to-face with her sister. The ship rocks with the impact of her.

Alex looks her sister in the face. “Go!”

Kara pushes, but she can’t seem to stop the ship. “Come on!” she yells, and her words penetrate the glass, even if Alex’s don’t.

Alex smiles. “You got this.” Her hand taps the glass.  “You can do this.”

She knows her voice won’t penetrate the glass, but her words do. Supergirl nods, and puts her hand against the glass just opposite Alex’s, and starts to push harder against the force of the ship.

It’s a big ship, with mighty thrust, and it pushes ever skyward, locked in a battle with Supergirl herself. Kara’s face is riddled with apology, with pain, with the force she must be pushing with, with the thinness of the atmosphere at such an altitude. She doesn’t look confident.

“You got this!” Alex shouts.

She watches her sister push, as hard as she’s ever pushed, as strong as she can be. Alex feels the ship groan and strain against the resistance.

“Come on! Come on!” Kara screams.

But the ship doesn’t stop, not quite. It keeps moving forward, engines straining.

Kara’s eyes meet her own.

“I can’t.” These words don’t penetrate, but their inevitability does.

Alex puts her hand to the glass. She can only imagine the warmth when her sister, her baby alien sister, put her hand to the outside.

“You have to.” 

She watches as Supergirl pushes, and pushes herself. But something in Kara’s face tells the story, more than words ever could: she’s running on empty. She’s running out of her boundless abilities.

“Don’t leave me,” Kara says. There are tears in her eyes. They’re tears of exhaustion, of frustration, of fear.

“Don’t let me,” Alex whispers.

Supergirl puts her hand against the glass one more time, and Alex does too, and the tears come hot to her eyes. She’s pushed herself past her limits already, and Alex knows it.

Kara mouthes, or maybe says, “I’m sorry.” And then Supergirl is totally drained, her powers wasted against an engine far stronger than her will, and all that’s left of her is a handprint on either side of the glass.

A handprint, and Alex’s tears, and then Earth becomes just a dwindling dream in the distance.

 

###

 

Kara falls.

She isn’t afraid of falling. She can’t be; she’s fallen from as high, she’s flown out into space. She wonders, vaguely, what will happen to her spent body if she hits the water from however high she is. Wonders if it will be quick.

Alex’s face, tears in her eyes, haunts Kara as she falls. The fear was unmistakable.

She thinks of the time she was lost.

Kara was thirteen. Her adoptive parents -- the Danvers, they weren't Mom and Dad, not yet -- had brought her and Alex to the Midvale mall. Alex had spotted a group of friends over by the concessions, older girls, the kind who called Kara "weird" and "freak". Alex waved, and said hi, and before Kara knew she was gone, vanished. The Danvers had split off for some other clime, something about a gazebo (whatever that was), and Kara found herself in the middle of the mall.

She was surrounded by people, aliens and foreigners all, their clothing without crests and their giggles without bounds. The noise of them was overwhelming.

But it was the first time since Kara Zor-El fell to Earth that she was alone. Panic gripped her chest. She felt for the first time like she was small, like she was a thousand light years from a home that no longer existed. And she was so deeply afraid. The fear was like blood, pulsing through every part of her.

She had forgotten her X-ray vision, had forgotten her super hearing as anything other than sensory overload.  And so she wandered the mall, her shoulder forward and her head down, looking for a Danvers, any Danvers, to take her home. She had roamed for an hour, not daring to speak to anyone. She was alone, and she was terrified, until Jeremiah finally found her and wrapped her in a hug.

Her ears worked just fine when they got home. She heard not only her own lesson – _if you get lost, stay in one place, we’ll come find you_ \-- but the harsher, sterner words that had been reserved for Alex. The ones she was not meant to hear. The upbraiding: _she’s your sister now. You need to act like it. You need to watch out for her_.

She remembers feeling alone and frightened.

And as she falls, she knows in her bones that Alex feels that same loneliness, flung into the vastness of space with no way back.

Kara falls, but she does not hit the ground. The end does not come quickly.

Winn catches her. Deploys some crazy techno-thing he built into her suit that turns her cape into a parachute. He catches her by preparing for something like this before it happens. He catches her this way a lot. It’s how he shows his love.

 

###

 

The DEO is in an uproar. Humans scrambling. Communications specialists trying to reach the ship. Winn trying to find where it went. Kara can see it all, hear even more. She’s trapped in a sun bed, waiting for her powers to recharge.

James sits with her, his hand next to her. She warns him that he’ll probably get cancer. But he holds her hand anyway while she recharges, fills herself up.

They both know she won’t need to find some emotional moment to get her powers back this time.

 

###

 

There’s a fight between Kara and J’onn about the pod, but it’s one he loses quickly. It is, after all, her ship. Her sister. Her choice.

She doesn’t know where she’s going, but she’s going there as quickly as she can.

Winn has a lead, something he thinks he saw in the trajectory before the ship disappeared, but he can’t be sure. It’s not a friendly world, this place where Alex Danvers has gone, or may have gone.

Kara will take it, will take anything to get her big sister back.

As the pod closes around her, she puts her hand to the glass, the glass that Kal-El ripped  off when she landed. It’s not the same as the glass that Alex touched, but it’s all she’s got.

“Just stay in one place,” Kara says. “I’ll find you.”

Her pod lifts off. She’ll get coordinates later.

 

###

 

Time passes. It always does.

Winn tries to let it. He fails miserably.

At first, Kara checks in every day, sometimes twice, for updates. Where she is. Where she’s looking. Whether she’s found a trace, or Winn has. She picked up Alex’s scent in the Thracian system, but it was a false lead. She’s out looking again. He does what he can to be supportive.

It’s hard. He just wants his best friend back. But she needs to do this, so he says nothing.

The first time it’s two days between updates, Winn assumes the worst. Her pods comm systems have to initiate the contact, so it’s one-way. Every waiting hour is agony. When she calls in again he almost cries.

But she’s slowly backing off, slowly letting more and more time go before she checks back in.

Now it’s every month, every two.

Earth is threatened, and saved, and threatened again twice over before he hears from Kara again. Guardian tears his rotator cuff and almost dies, and hangs up the suit, goes back to running CatCo. Cat Grant becomes a philanthropy magnate and one of the first space tourists, spending millions for a two-day lap around the Earth.

Kara promises to check in for Winn’s and Lyra’s wedding. He asks her to be his space-maid of space-honor. She agrees, laughing. It’s the first time he’s seen her laugh in a year.

The wedding comes. She doesn’t check in. By the time she does, she’s forgotten he’s already married.

Winn gets promoted to head technologist at the DEO, then assistant director.

He grows fat. He grows a goatee, then shaves it, then grows it again.

It’s not four months before J’onn falls in the field, sacrifices himself to save a world that would never have truly accepted him. The funeral is attended by every DEO agent, bar one.  

It’s six months after that before Kara checks in. Director Schott has to break the news across ten thousand light-years that Kara’s third father-figure is dead. The first two died long ago.

The world keeps turning, and Winn keeps trying to save it.

 

###

 

In the end it isn’t Kara Zor-El, but Barry Allen, who brings Alex home.

They reappear together in Kara’s old apartment, to the shock and berating of the current tenants. They leave, dodging thrown vases. Barry isn’t even sure he’s in the right Earth this time. He wasn’t the last four.

But he is, and he knows it as soon as he brings Alex to the DEO building, the new skyrise on Hester.

There’s a misunderstanding with some guards, then some frantic phone calls. A tearful reunion. A long-winded story. Winn holds Alex tighter than is becoming of the Director. He tells her about J’onn.  He tells her that her back pay, with overtime, is waiting for her, carefully invested. It’s a small fortune that isn’t so small. He tells her. She nods, like this isn’t real. He wants to ask, and doesn’t, where she’s been.

Barry, now pushing fifty or more, smiles, and slips quietly away back to some other Earth.  

Alex’s hair is gray now, and she brushes it back from her eyes. 

“And Kara?” she asks. Something in her eyes fears the worst. Winn points, points up.

“She’s still out there. Looking for you.”

He calls the communications director – a title Alex didn’t know even existed. Tells her to put a message out on every frequency. _Kara, come home_. He tells her to bounce it off of every communications post in the galaxy. She mentions the word _cost_ and he almost fires her on the spot.

She doesn’t know. How could she? She was a teenager when Supergirl left Earth. She thinks it was a betrayal, an abandonment. She did not know a world with Kara Danvers’ smile.

Winn doesn’t say, but he’s not as hopeful as he wants to be. It’s been two years since Kara checked in, and the feeling that they may have lost her still sits in his belly.

 

###

 

Alex goes to see Maggie Sawyer. Finds her happy, with a gaggle of adopted kids. With a wife. Maggie Lehane wraps her in a hug hard enough to crush.

She asks the questions Winn doesn’t, the ones Alex doesn’t, can’t, won’t answer. She leaves Maggie to her life and her wife. She had clung to a thought, a tendril of smoke from some signal fire deep within her, that Maggie might have waited.

But it’s been twenty-six years. Why would she have?

Alex rents a small apartment with her earnings, and declines Winn’s generous offer of a therapist, and drinks Scotch. Single-malt, aged. She can afford it. She’s got millions.

 

###

 

Alex is standing in her kitchen, washing out a pan. Her eyes are red from crying, the strange unbidden tears she does not understand and cannot stop. The alcohol stops them, or starts them, depending on the night. She has already cried her tears for the night, so she decides to pour herself a few more fingers of Scotch.

Alex feels a breeze in the room. Like every breeze of the last eight months on Earth, she feels a flutter of hope that it just might have been the breeze of a passing super-sister. She stamps the hope down, like she has a thousand times before.

But this time the breeze speaks. “Is… is that you? Is that really you, or am I…?”

Alex turns, slowly, heart pounding in her chest. “In the living flesh,” she says, indicating herself.

Her sister’s suit has aged, with holes and tears and a third of the cape burned off somehow, but she has barely aged. Alex searches her forever-young face. The only marker of time is a tired expression and some crow’s feet around the eyes. She’s painfully aware of her own wrinkled skin.

“I looked. Alex, I looked _so hard_. I searched every star I could _find_ …”

Alex shakes her head. “I know. It’s okay.”

Kara’s big blue eyes well up with tears. “I’m… Rao, Alex, I’m so sorry.”

But Alex just opens her arms, and the Danvers sisters hug for the first time in twenty-six years, and the hug is so tight that Alex thinks her sister will break her ribs, and that’s alright with her.

“You were supposed to stay still,” Kara sobs. “You were supposed to stay where I could find you.”

Alex laughs. “ _You_ were the one who was supposed to stay still, dummy. _I_ was the one who was supposed to find _you_.”

The Danvers stand in Alex’s kitchen, reunited. They sob joyous tears, and tell the stories they can tell no one else, and eventually they call out for pot stickers.


End file.
